How To Add A Folder To The All Apps List In Windows 10

Fatima Wahab

3 years ago

Windows 10 got rid of the Start Screen that Windows 8 imposed on users. No one really liked it and the confusion between desktop and Modern UI was frustrating. Even veteran Windows users struggled to make sense of it. The Start Screen is gone but Microsoft didn’t abandon the idea of having a large, all screen consuming list of installed apps appear on your screen. It just changed how they executed the concept. For all intents and purposes, the All Apps list is what the Start Screen and its list of all apps has been reduced to and you’re free to resize it however you like. That said, the All Apps list comes with two limitations; you can only have 500 items in it, and there is no simple way to add folders to it. If you want to add a folder to the list, it’s possible and here’s how.

Create a shortcut for the folder you want to add to the All Apps list. Rename it if you don’t want the word ‘Shortcut’ to appear in the name. Open Windows Explorer and go to

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

and paste the shortcut there.

That’s all it takes. Open the Start Menu and click the All Apps button and navigate to the letter that the folder’s name begins with in the list. Not only will the folder appear there, it will do so with a ‘New’ tag that normally appears for newly installed apps. Click the folder to open it in Windows Explorer.

You can use the same trick for apps that you’ve installed on other drives by pasting a shortcut to the EXE file in this same folder. You don’t necessarily have to create a shortcut for the folder you want to add but doing so saves space because your folder can exist on any drive without taking up space on the C drive.